After injecting cancer hospital with ransomware, crims threaten to swat patients::Remember the good old days when ransomware crooks vowed not to infect medical centers?
Can’t wait for the GTA Online players to swat me in my home… wait we don’t have a SWAT that automatically kicks doors in without any question, so shove that threat up yours, hackers!
Jokes aside, the “swatting” being a term and applicable threat method is pretty sad. Especially when the duty officers responsible for your protection can be the ones that can put your life at risk with unverified reasons bordering institutional paranoia.
Especially when the duty officers responsible for your protection can be the ones that can put your life at risk with unverified reasons bordering institutional paranoia.
How black America has always seen police
Bordering? There’s a university whose police department has a fucking anti mine personnel carrier in my state. It was designed for wartime Baghdad not Columbus during Pax Americana, but there it is. As a white woman I’m scared of cops because there’s nobody less hesitant to kill than a scared cop, but I also know that they do hesitate to kill scared white women. They don’t hesitate to kill black people. They’re taught that if they’re scared and don’t respond with violence that’s how they die and we don’t punish that behavior, we just give them military equipment
If only hospitals weren’t such lucrative businesses with millions of dollars to pay a ransom, they wouldn’t be a target. No one is targeting ransomware to the Fire Departments or DMV.
I mean most ransomware isn’t targeted at all.
The Dallas Fire Department was sure affected in their ransomware attack. https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/local/dallas-ransomware-attack-progress-one-week-later/287-f0af11f2-1c52-4d33-a706-8fdfa1f0e5f1
Its more likely that they are required to have insurance that would cover ransomware due to the sensitive information they have on patients
It’s this. It’s also one of the most profitable forms of insurance for the insurance companies since everyone needs it but few end up using it, and the fact that insurance exists at all drives the prices way up (like every other industry they touch).
On the other hand, once people started paying, the ransomware scene became an actual industry. Before, the “send money to this number to get your files back” part was a bonus scam and you’d almost never get a response, so getting ransomed was a death sentence for a business that didn’t have working backups. Now the encryption key is sent 99% of the time the ransom is paid, and larger groups even offer tech support to their victims if they have trouble decrypting.
Source: half-remembered snippets from last year’s CompTIA Network Security course. Can’t actually double check it since we live in a capitalist hellscape where information is rented and goes poof after a few months.
Municipalities are absolutely targeted by ransomware attacks. Texas has had several cities get hit within the past year or two alone. It takes down everything from their courts to their emergency services and water bill systems.
The NHS in the UK gets targeted all the time and they aren’t exactly rolling in cash
Not yet, anyways.
Finnish municipal services get targeted
Crims?
Hey Choom, we have some Crims stealing X-plo at the Swarnolisa. Make sure to bring the Yookles for backup.
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Habbo Hotel?
LOL @ this title. What a joke
Swatting was a thing ten years ago, and our law enforcement departments don’t care. So its not surprising to me criminal elements would take advantage of our trigger happy state-funded racketeering mobs.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Extortionists are now threatening to swat hospital patients — calling in bomb threats or other bogus reports to the police so heavily armed cops show up at victims’ homes — if the medical centers don’t pay the crooks’ ransom demands.
After intruders broke into Seattle’s Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center’s IT network in November and stole medical records – everything from Social Security numbers to diagnoses and lab results – miscreants threatened to turn on the patients themselves directly.
“Ransoms have been allowed to reach lottery jackpot levels, and the predictable upshot is that people are willing to use more and more extreme measures to collect a payout,” Emsisoft threat analyst Brett Callow told The Register.
Earlier this week, the security shop called for a complete ban on ransom payments, noting that extortion tactics were becoming more extreme and now include swatting threats.
Sam Rubin, VP of Unit 42 Consulting at Palo Alto Networks, told The Register his team hadn’t seen any swatting attempts by extortion crews in 2023, though the shift in tactics seems likely.
The consulting and incident response unit has also witnessed miscreants sending flowers to a victim company’s executive team, and issuing ransom demands via printers connected to the affected firm’s network.
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